Where Liberalism Is Alive and Well!

I stopped reading The Huffington Post over a year and a half ago. One of the reasons was the misleading headlines that lured me into clicking on a piece and then when I read it, it wasn’t anything like the screaming headline that sucked me in. I was also sick of the tabloid style gossip and “celebritainment” that polluted the site. If I wanted that crap, I would go to TMZ.

But the main reason I quit reading is because this once touted “liberal” website began a turn to the right, where Arianna started of course — working for Newt Gingrich. After the merger with AOL, my thoughts were confirmed as Arianna took to the airwaves and proclaimed that “Huffpoo” isn’t liberal or conservative and how she and Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL, shared a vision. Tim Armstrong calls himself a libertarian but has given a lot of money to conservatives over the years. I’m sure they shared a vision.

So you can imagine my satisfaction when I read that The Huffington Post ranks last in the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). I’m not the only one who thinks that website sucks, apparently. When you build a website on the backs of liberals, trading on anger and outrage towards President George W. Bush and then turn your sights towards liberals and our Democratic president, what do you expect?. The word on the street these days is that the merger isn’t going so well and the entire deal is at risk of falling apart. I wonder what Arianna’s next scam will be?

I thought I would give some highlights of some of the stupid, dangerous and radical ideas that Newt Gingrich has spewed over the years. This quasi-intellectual blowhard seems to be able to con some of the even more stupid media, but those of us with critical thinking ability see through his stupidity. He clearly has an obsession with WWII and Nazi Germany. Some highlights of Newt’s babbling, courtesy of Mother Jones…(emphasis mine)

1978 In an address to College Republicans before he was elected to the House, Gingrich says: “I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.

1984 Gingrich takes advantage of the arrival of C-Span to deliver scathing condemnations of his colleagues. He accuses Democrats of appeasement and distributing “communist propaganda,” and threatens to press charges against them for writing a letter to Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega. House Speaker Tip O’Neill calls it “the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress.”

1985 Gingrich calls Reagan’s upcoming meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev ”the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich.”

1985Gingrich compares a disputed House election in Indiana to the Holocaust. “We have talked a lot in recent weeks about the Holocaust, about the incredible period in which Nazi Germany killed millions of people and, in particular, came close to wiping out European Jewry.

1989 He explains to the Washington Post why he fights with his second wife, Marianne: “It’s not even that it matters to me. It’s just the habit of dominance, the habit of being the center of my staff and the center of the news media.” Newt gives the marriage a “53–47″ shot of surviving.

1989 Gingrich lays out his electoral roadmap: “The left-wing Democrats will represent the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness, and the total right to cripple innocent people in the name of letting hooligans loose.”

1994 A South Carolina woman, Susan Smith, murders her two sons. Gingrich draws the only logical conclusion: “I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. The only way you get change is to vote Republican.”

1994 He sums up his political philosophy: “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day.”

1998 Gingrich steps down as Speaker, amid ethics complaints and rumors of an extramarital affair. He frames his decision in pragmatic terms: “I’m willing to lead, but I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals.”

2007 “We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.” Two years later, Gingrich unveils a new Spanish-language website, The Americano.

2008 Gingrich tells Bill O’Reilly that “there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us.” The gay and secular fascist movement, Gingrich charges, is “prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it.”

2010 Gingrich warns that Obama’s agenda “would mean the end of America as it has been for the last 400 years.”

2010 Sign of the times: Gingrich swaps gay secular fascism for “secular-socialist machine“—which he says “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”

2010 A year after writing a book about noted anti-colonialist George Washington, Gingrich suggests that the current president holds a radical, anti-British worldview of his own. “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?”Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

2011Gingrich tells the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody that he was driven to his cheat on his previous two wives because of his one true love: America. “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”

2011 Secular-socialists give way to atheist-Islamists: “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [his grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.” His spokesman later clarified that Gingrich meant either Islamists or atheists would take over America, not both.

I have a feeling there will be more crap flowing from Newt Gingrich’s mouth in the very near future. He loves getting attention in any way he can. I’ve been wondering since it looked like he was getting in the race, whether Arianna Huffington will make her full pendulum swing back to the party that seems to be in her blood, the Republican Party. I fully expect Arianna to endorse her old buddy Newt and start working for him again. She wrote a piece about what a great president ole’ Newt would be. Ah, gotta love the internets.

As if many of us haven’t been saying for years that Huffington is a fake Progressive, an opportunist in it for the money and fame, she had to go and prove us right, or at least make us feel like we were dead on right.

Arianna Huffington, formerly the Queen of the Liberal Political Kingdom online, has hired Conservative ideologue Andrew Breitbart, the same guy who spends so much of his time colluding with known con artist James O’Keefe, worked as an editor for the notorious Matt Drudge, worked for Ms. Huffington previously as a researcher, and helped her to launch The Huffington Post.

I absolutely loved this post by Matt Osborne at Osborne Ink about Bradley Manning’s detention for his admitted leaking of military documents. My favorite parts of Matt’s post follow…

Manning has not been convicted — yet — but there is nothing especially harsh or unusual about his conditions. The Rosenbergs were isolated. Aldrich Ames was isolated. There is no “plan” to drive Bradley Manning insane. He’s a prisoner accused of giving away his country’s secrets. Such prisoners are held in solitary confinement as standard counterintelligence protocol. Who wants a caught spy to tell the other side what you have sweated out of him in the interrogation room? Who wants him to be free to do more damage?

[…]

Giving away American secrets is against the law; the penalties are stiff. Manning knew that, but chose to give secrets away — and then got caught by bragging about it to strangers on the internet. That there are no other prisoners in Quantico accused of espionage is a happy accident: most American service members take their oaths as seriously as I did, and do. Manning didn’t. A justice system will adjudicate what that means, not Glenn Greenwald.

And finally, if you haven’t read Lawrence Wright’s piece in the New Yorker about Scientology (The Apostate), I highly recommend it. It is a long piece, so set aside some time or plan to read it in multiple sessions. I’ve personally been fascinated by the cult of scientology and in particular, it’s appeal to celebrities. This piece sheds a lot of light on the situation. I’ve thought for years about doing a documentary on the Church of Scientology and may still do it, but I have reservations because of their ways. Read the piece and you will know what I mean.

It is going to be really fun for me to watch as the Huffington Post suffers the backlash from Arianna’s opportunistic ways. I don’t really hate the woman or anything, but several months ago I did a little research on her and found out a lot of very interesting things. I have to give thanks to Grant in Texas for the awesome links to some stories I hadn’t seen. I’ve been sitting on most of the information I found about her, it’s not like anyone couldn’t find it themselves if they know how to use Google. I may write more in the days to come, but it looks like her house of cards is starting to topple on it’s own. From a story at The Raw Story…

Adbusters magazine set out to unite those disaffected former supporters of Arianna Huffington’s flagship site by suggesting they use social media to promote alternatives.

“Socialite Arianna Huffington built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists,” a post at Adbusters begins. “She exploited our idealism and let us labor under the illusion that the Huffington Post was different, independent and leftist. Now she’s cashed in and three thousand indie bloggers find themselves working for a megacorp.”

But the Huffington Post is not Arianna’s to sell. It is ours: the lefty writers and readers, environmentalism activists and anti-corporate organizers who flooded the site with 25 million visits a month. So we’re going to take it back.

We’ll stop going to her site. And we’ll stop blogging for her too. Then we’ll give birth to an alternative to AOL’s HuffPo by using the #huffpuff hash tag to tell the world about our favorite counter-culture websites and indie blogs.

“We are the ones who built the Huffington Post. And now we will be the ones who will huff & puff it down,” Adbusters concluded.

If I were a liberal blogger who was used by her, I’d be just a little bit pissed at this new deal. I hope that this backlash builds momentum and the real story of Arianna Huffington will finally be told. MSNBC deserves a lot of blame in my opinion, they helped to build her up as a “liberal” and constantly refer to the Huffington Post as a liberal or progressive website. She could always count on MSNBC to help promote her brand, I wonder if they are getting a cut from the deal just like all those liberal bloggers who provided content to her for free. I have a feeling that comments like the one below are only going to piss off those used and abused bloggers even more. She is unbelievable. Just a little bit of schadenfreude going on in this bloggers brain…

Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, had been trying to downplay the importance of partisan politics after the announcement.

“We don’t see ourselves as left,” Huffington told Politico. “And I think it’s one area where news consumers are ahead of the media, because they know that continuing to see everything that’s happening as a right-left issue is missing what’s happening, and is also making it much harder for us to be properly informed.”

She’s done with us liberals now, she cashed in. On to the next group of rubes, she’s already been trying to attract the Tea Party folks with her recent book that is nothing but platitudes and populist opportunism. What was it that P.T. Barnum said?

This is a post I put up a while back that I decided to dust off and share with you all again in light of the completion of Arianna’s Scam, AOL paying her $315 Million dollars for her Huffington Post website (don’t go there). The original headline read “The Huffington Post, A Stolen Idea!.” I’ve also put links to other posts I’ve done about her below.

Arianna with her buddy Newt Gingrich

Politico has a long piece up about a lawsuit brought by two Democratic consultants, Peter Daou and James Boyce which claims that the idea for The Huffington Post was stolen from them. A while back, I did some research into Arianna Huffington and came across some rather revealing things about Arianna and her MO. The most glaring of these was her teaming up with Newt Gingrich in the early 90’s to help bring about Gingrich’s Republican Revolution, oh and apparently she’s still hanging with him. I’m old enough to remember that bullshit and have always been skeptical of Huffington and see her as an opportunist. Her new book, no plug here, attempts to play on people’s fears about the economic crisis. I hope to find time to write about that soon, she’s been not so subtly appealing to the angry people in the country….there’s money to be made on that anger, you know? From the Politico piece…

The complaint is a direct challenge to the left’s most important media property from two stalwarts of the progressive movement. And it challenges Huffington’s own oft-told story of coming up with the idea in conversation with Lerer and other friends.

“Huffington has styled herself as a ‘new media’ maven and an expert on the effective deployment of news and celebrity on the Internet in the service of political ends,” says the complaint. “As will be shown at trial, Huffington’s and Lerer’s image with respect to the Huffington Post is founded on false impressions and inaccuracies: They presented the ‘new media’ ideas and plans of Peter Daou and James Boyce as their own in order to raise money for the website and enhance their image, and breached their promises to work with Peter and James to develop the site together.”

It certainly doesn’t surprise me to read this, that’s what Republicans are all about, making money on the backs of other people. It completely fits with her opportunistic MO. She is the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Every time I hear her introduced as a liberal, I do a spit take with my coffee or Lipton Diet Green Tea…and we all know how painful that can be. She is no liberal, she just shifted her “mark” to liberals. She saw the pendulum swinging away from conservatism with the election of George W. Bush and saw a great opportunity to capitalize on it. Recently, it seems she is jealous of all the money Glenn Beck and his sorts are making off the anger on the right. I see her book as a blatant appeal to those people, she want’s some of that money too. More from Politico…

Lerer, a former AOL executive who once worked as a spokesman for junk bond king Michael Milken, later involved other Internet gurus – the marketing expert Jonah Perretti, and Drudge collaborator Andrew Breitbart – in their launch, and Daou and Boyce aren’t the first to contest the Huffington Post’s lineage.

“I created the Huffington Post,” Breitbart told Wired in March, prompting Huffington to reply that he “wasn’t present” for the initial 2004 meeting.

Can you even fucking believe it, Breitbart was there at the start of The Huffington Post. Now that speaks volumes in my mind. Andrew Fucking Breitbart working with Arianna, and of course this is after she supposedly saw the light and became more progressive….cough, spit. I remember seeing her talk on C-SPAN in the early 2000’s and thinking, wow, a conservative who’s seen the light and grown. As I continued to watch her speak, I had a sense about her that she was slippery. She talked around a lot of issues, was very slick in her appeal to liberals, playing on their dislike for George W. Bush, using clever put downs of him to gain acceptance. I have to admit, I was digging what she was saying, I disliked ole’ W. about as much as anyone. But even then, I was cautious because of her slickness. It was only after I started getting pissed off at the misleading headlines on her site that I started doing some digging and discovered the above links.

Is the Huffington Post the “left’s most important media property”? Really? Because I have never opened the Huffington Post unless directed there by someone else. I have almost never linked to them (probably less than a dozen times in six years). I don’t think I’ve ever been to their home-page. I think if they were really so important, I’d find I couldn’t blog effectively without knowing what was going on there. But, for the most part, the Huffington Post doesn’t even exist for me. It’s like the Drudge Report. I know it exists, and occasionally someone points out to me that they have some interesting material, but that’s it. And why is the Huffington Post considered a left-leaning site? I don’t consider Arianna Huffington to be left-leaning. She’s a critic of President Bush and the current brand of know-nothing politics of the right. But she’s certainly no liberal. Above all, she’s a business woman and a celebrity. She’s not a part of any movement I am aware of. I’m not knocking her, but I just don’t get why her site is supposed to be important to the left. For what?

I used to frequent her website until I noticed a change in course and their turning on the President. I was often sucked into the misleading headlines which many times didn’t reflect was in the actual article, a blatant bait and switch of sorts. She is very good at making money off people’s emotions, I suspect she will continue to do well in that regard. I just won’t be a part of it.

Here are some links to other posts I’ve done about The Huffington Post, Arianna inspired me. There is something about a conservative trying to act like a liberal that pisses me off, for some reason.

So the Huffington Post was bought out by AOL and Arianna has finally cashed in on her scam. She saw an opportunity to make money off liberals, and she took it. $300,000,000 will make you forget your new found liberal ideas in a heartbeat. You have to give her credit for making money off and feeding the discontent on the left, she’s done it masterfully. I’m listening for Jane Hamsher, Cenk Uygur, Glenn Greenwald and the rest of the gang to put her in the “corporatist” wing of the political world. I am not holding my breath, however.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person left on the planet who is patient. I certainly have moments when I am not, but I’ve had a lot of opportunity to practice it over the years. Ugh! As the health care debate has gone on over the last year, I’ve been holding my fire, watching to see what would come to be.

When the Obama Administration signaled, a while ago, that it might be flexible on the public option – oh my god, the outcry was deafening, the freakin sky was falling in on some of these folks. I always like to name them….the Arianna Huffington-Jane Hamsher syndicate, Cenk Uygur, who is also aligned with the syndicate…Howard Dean (who I still love though), he’s the most reasonable one in the “sky is falling crowd.” , I’m not sure about Aravosis because he is dead to me. :) I won’t grace his piece of shit blog ever again, unless it is to attack his traitorous, bitchy ass. Oh, sorry….I lost it for a second, I was treated by him and a few of his whiners like scum. Onward!

So I saw a few stories about an effort by a group of Senators to bring back the public option through reconciliation and the number was growing throughout the day. It looks like they all want us to shut up about it….shhhhh, don’t tell the Republicans and Joe Lieberman. The White House isn’t commenting. So maybe I’ve jumped the gun and I should be more patient. Shit. Too late.

My previous post about LGBT getting some change and now a possibility of the return of the public option, I think some folks need to apologize and get back on-board this movement to repair the damages of the “Idiot Years” as I hope the history books will call them, you know from the day George W. Bush was inaugurated to the time we all waived goodbye to them.

If you haven’t seen this clip with Chris Hayes from the Nation making an appearance on Morning Joke by Corporate Coffee, check it out. I don’t think Chris will be asked back anytime soon, he didn’t fit with their narrative. He was awesome. And to get my Arianna Huffington stab in, Mort Zuckerman is also on the panel who was dating Arianna recently. He’s one of the Obama haters who Joe loves to have on to help him bash the president. He’s a supposed liberal, yeah right. Watch how he sides with the right wing on the rule of law, he seems to bend his ideology when it means he can bash Obama.

Watching Morning Joe this morning helped to clarify my understanding of the “problems” that the media is saying President Obama has with his supporters, or more accurately, those who voted for him. Tim Dickinson from Rolling Stone was on talking about his article called “No We Can’t” about how the field operations for the Obama campaign, the grassroots folks haven’t been included in his administration. As if we were all going to follow him to Washington and we’d have his Blackberry number to give him our opinion on things. Most of the impatience with the president and the stories the media has been pushing are based, in my opinion, on complaints from a few who are novices at how things work in Washington. Many are people who never paid attention to politics before Obama came along, so they are naive to the way things work in Washington. Of course the media, who does know, plays along with them to get a story. They rarely point out the practical reality of how things work in Washington and the limited power that the executive branch really has in the process.

To Tim Dickinson’s point about this army of supporters who were going to march on Washington and change things. Well, once Obama was elected, most, if not all of them moved on with their lives, work, play, all those mundane things we all do when there isn’t a presidential election to obsess over. Maybe some thought they would get cabinet positions or have that direct line to the president, but found out that an election does have an end date, it’s called election day. When someone wins a race, they don’t keep running back and crossing the finish line over and over again. The race is over at that point with the next one in 4 years. Seasoned political observers know this and retreat to their easy chairs for a few years until the troops need to be mobilized again. So why have a few of the idealogues who projected all their hopes and dreams on President Obama, unrealistically I might add, gained so much prominence in the media? The answer is that the media loves that kind of story, it sells papers and increases viewers, it’s like Hollywood gossip or a jilted lover story. The health care battle is a prime example of the naiveté of people like Jane Hamsher and Arianna Huffington who seem to relish the contrarian position, motivated by clicks on their websites and donations to their many “non-profits” that they have attached to their money making ventures. Do they really think that if the president had just been more forceful in pushing single payer, universal health care for all, squash the insurance industry-type policies that Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln etc. would have just fallen in line?

The republicans have been fanning these flames too, they love what’s happening on the left, the infighting, the trashing of Obama for not being more liberal, the unrealistic ideas about how Washington works, they feed the fire with kindling. Joe Scarborough has made a living out of it on his morning show. He loves to bring on Arianna Huffington, Mark Halperin, John Heileman, and anyone else who likes to talk about process and spin things to the right. I also notice how when he does have Eugene Robinson or someone else who might actually deal in reality, he often asks them stupid questions about Tiger Woods or Sarah Palin, or he changes the subject to sports or whatever. He deflects any comments that might actually go against the narrative he is working so hard to promote for the Republican Party. Morning Joe is a well oiled propoganda machine for the Republicans.

I was torturing myself this morning as usual and watching Morning Starbucks with Joe and Mika. Arianna Huffington was on with them, apparently she hosted a party for Mika’s book last night with the Hollywood folks, she is kind of the west coast’s Sally Quinn. I watched as Joe and Arianna agreed on damn near everything, it inspired me to write this post about the transformation of The Huffington Post from being a Bush bashing blog to an Obama bashing blog.

I remember vividly when Arianna Huffington broke with the Bush/Cheney Republican Party, I saw a speech that she gave on C-SPAN and thought, wow, a Republican criticizing a fellow Republican. She then turned it into a business by launching The Huffington Post blog and news site. She seemed rather good at attacking Bush and drew many progressives to her site for that reason. I have to admit, I was a regular reader during the Bush/Cheney years and it continued until several months ago when the transition from attacking Bush to attacking Obama occurred. It was a gradual process that has now taken full bloom. In a recent post by Arianna, she interprets the president’s State of the Union address through her veil of cynicism and her true conservative beliefs are coming into display again. Here is a piece from her post…

But judging from the speech, he also spent a lot of time going over the results of focus groups and polls. Indeed, the speech, despite its charm, humor, and occasionally impassioned rhetoric, had the feel of being focus-grouped within an inch of its life. There was a decidedly paint-by-poll-numbers air about it.

Ah, so he doesn’t really believe anything he said, he’s just saying what a poll says he should say. She somehow then jumps into blaming Obama for the two wars that he inherited and is trying to clean up. It’s like she’s just swapped out Obama’s name with Bush’s, because they are soooooo similar, aren’t they? She then goes on to write this….

The president’s Pander-palooza continued with the middle class-friendly initiatives he announced on Monday and touched on again during the SOTFG (State of the Focus Group).

Oh no, not middle class-friendly initiatives, that must be pandering. It’s so fucking easy to be cynical about everything, it can’t possibly be that he cares about the middle class. She then blames the whole bailout of the banks on Obama, even though I seem to remember that it was a Bush administration proposal, before President Obama even took office. Remember, the sky was falling, pensions were at risk, life savings at risk, the housing market was about to collapse, the stock market…..great depression….oh nooooooooooo. So our new president did what everyone told him had to be done and bailed out the banks. Almost all of that money has been paid back, but somehow that fact eludes the people who want to attack the president, convenient amnesia.

When are the democrats and real progressives going to call out the Arianna Huffington’s, the Jane Hamsher’s and the Cenk Uygur’s on their undermining of progressive causes? When are we going to stop playing footsie with those who want to bring down our democratic president who is fighting against the new 41 seat majority of Republicans? When are we going to take a look at these folks as the turncoats that they are? I’m going to keep hammering them.

Who The Hell Am I!

I’m a liberal that is extreme in some ways and not in others. I support President Obama and make no apologies for it. I think he has done a phenomenal job, especially when you consider that he inherited a huge mess and has faced unprecedented opposition from a lazy & desperate Republican Party. I’m a film producer/director/editor, adjunct professor, technician, media critic and photographer when I’m not reading left wing blogs and typing on this one. – On Twitter @ExtremeLiberal or Email at liberalforreal (at) gmail.com

Own An Important Part Of American History!

Cicely Tyson narrates this award winning documentary that tells the story of African American migration from the old south to the prosperous north. Winner of 5 Awards including "Best Film" at the Astoria International Film Festival, the "Paul Robeson Award" at the Newark Black Film Festival and "Best Film Relating To The Black Experience" at the XXV International Black Cinema Berlin/Germany!